


Hope (Is Not a Course of Action)

by ThisDominionIsMine



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Caretaking, Everything Hurts, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pack Mother Stiles Stilinski, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-13
Updated: 2013-05-13
Packaged: 2017-12-11 17:27:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/801253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisDominionIsMine/pseuds/ThisDominionIsMine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which everything is a metaphor for the pain that Derek cannot handle, but Stiles can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hope (Is Not a Course of Action)

The fundamental concept behind running is trying to get somewhere at a quicker rate than usually necessitated. The fundamental concept behind _running_ is trying to get away from something, someone, somewhere… it’s getting away. Geographically, physically – sometimes across the room is enough. Building a barricade of air.

You can’t run from a death that is not your own. Not with feet or wheels or engines. So Stiles builds his fortress out of time, blockading the trade routes of memory and hope, diverting them, until they stream _around_ skin gone deathly white and stretched over the bones of an unnaturally-withered face and the idea of a tomorrow that that face may open its eyes to see.

He’s okay. He’s fine. It’s just. No. He’s fine.

Like Derek’s fine. Like Isaac’s fine. Like Erica and Jackson and Boyd are fine. Like Allison’s fine. Like Scott’s fine, fine, _fine_.

Fine and dandy.

Fine in a way that makes heat a shock – summer days; hot water in the shower; Derek’s palm curving around his neck, thumb pressing in under his ear; breath pickpocketed out of his lungs, wrapped up and hidden away, out of his reach.

He heard that Buddy Wakefield spoken word piece that one time somewhere in the middle of burying Erica and hiding from the Alphas and Peter disappearing and everyone realizing what shit-stopping _terrifying_ power Deaton’s been keeping on a leash for all these years. But the poem. He misses the title and doesn’t have the capacity to look it up with everything going on, but he remembers that one line, the one about forgiveness. _Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past_. By this point, Stiles’ past has more than a few dead bodies in it, and he’s long since given up on thinking that number might ever _de_ crease.

He hopes that it’s not God who he’s expected to forgive; agnosticism makes that tricky. Maybe it’s himself.

Maybe it’s Derek, who’s constantly submerging himself in the marketplace of grief and memory like Stiles learned _not_ to do for his own self-preservation. Derek could use a little forgiveness. From himself especially, but Stiles gets the feeling that this is a situation where even the tiniest bit counts. So he does tiny things: makes an extra grilled cheese when he knows Derek’s coming over, invites him over, stays longer than anyone else at the pack meetings, drags him to the library for research, keeps him from being alone with his brain for as many hours a day as possible, because Derek’s brain is not pro-Derek. Derek’s brain is thoroughly anti-Derek. Derek’s brain hates Derek more than all the Argents combined, and there are enough people who hate Derek without the dude adding to his own pile of shit.

And it’s shit that Stiles has to clean up, when Derek gets distracted by himself in a fight and slows up enough for someone to blow a fist-sized chunk out of Boyd’s arm or nearly tear Scott’s leg off. And when Derek gets his own goddamn ribcage clawed open by Deucalion, guess who gets to keep him lying down and hydrated and fed while the bone splinters knit  themselves back together? Stiles “the Human” Stilinski, that’s who.

Stiles the human, who is somehow better than any of the weres at keeping himself sound and whole, both physically and mentally. “Self-esteem-deprived adolescents” is Peter’s favorite phrase to describe them, before he drops off the map. Stiles doesn’t know why he doesn’t include himself in that generalization, but he doesn’t.  He knows who he is, what he is, and that’s not just because he doesn’t get furry and grow a set of fangs when the full moon rolls around. He’s Stiles. The human.

Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past.

Hope certainly isn’t capable of healing a were faster than they can heal themselves, and it can’t drag the wolfsbane spiral out of the ground around Erica, can’t bring Jackson back from the private school in Utah his parents packed him off to.  Not that Stiles can explain that to Scott, who walks the streets like he wants to heal every blistered slug and feed every starving sewer rat. Stiles leaves him to Isaac and Allison, because all the hope bound up in Scott’s body helps them, at least, look towards the future instead of the past.

But Scott isn’t going to dedicate any of his time to Derek. Stiles doesn’t even try to ask him to; there is no trust between those two, no ghost of a shadow of consent for anything beyond the barest necessities of cooperation required to avoid mutually assured destruction. It sucks, but it’s a fact that Stiles is powerless to change, so he works around it and keeps Derek from ostracizing himself any further (as best he can, anyway).

Derek is hard to heal, hard to touch, hard to watch. He’s a mannequin of pain from the moment he gets up in the morning, and Stiles knows, because he’s watched Derek wake up and fall asleep dozens of times long before the end of senior year rolls around, and Derek always wakes up, tenses up, locks his humanity up in a box and doesn’t loosen anything until he sacks out again that night or gets ripped to shreds and goes woozy from blood loss.

It’s after the ribcage-getting-clawed-open incident that he lets Stiles climb into the bed next to him, because Stiles is shaking and scared and spent several hours being ninety-eight-point-three percent sure that the sun was going to rise the next morning on a world that did not have Derek Hale in its list of living residents. And there’s only a thin sheet on the bed because it’s summer, muggy-hot, and Derek’s blood-hot like the big hairy furnace he is, but he’s every bit as alive as Stiles is, too, his hands steadier than Stiles’, and he tastes like salt-sweat and copper, which is probably about as good as can be expected under the circumstances of getting gutted and almost bleeding out, werewolf or no, and he hasn’t showered.

Stiles hasn’t either. That’s okay. It’s okay because it’s summer and they’d be gross and sweaty either way because Stiles throws one arm across the upper part of Derek’s torso and Derek hooks an elbow around Stiles’ neck and pulls him in against his side, rubs the hand over Stiles’ shoulder, leaves it sitting here, Stiles’ face pressed into his collarbone, totally okay with that. And Stiles gets to feel Derek go lax against him in a way that physically hurts to think back on.

When he wakes up in the morning, Derek’s already conscious, well on his way to stiffening into a mechanical weremonster for the day, so Stiles does everyone a favor and mumbles about what a terrible idea that is into Derek’s collarbone. And Derek doesn’t answer verbally so much as he rearranges Stiles and pulls him onto his chest sets their mouths together and breathes a rush of awareness into his lungs.

And Derek sucks at building fortresses and keeping himself out of the poisoned mires, okay, but bridges are a thing he keeps trying to build for himself. And Stiles is a master of bridges to go with all his other metaphorical architecture skills, okay. They can work on their bridges together. And maybe they’ll be okay. Okay? Okay.

They’ll be fine.


End file.
